When it came to getting our Z97 test rig up and running we did have a few issues which we thought we would bring up to possibly help with the confusion we ran into. We installed our CPU and booted the system fine, downloaded the latest BIOS and got that installed even easier but we couldn't get the system to run XMP and much more disappointingly do any form of overclocking. It turns out a normal BIOS flash wont actually update the microcode at a low enough level to get everything working as it should. You can use the Asus USB BIOS Flashback feature via a USB pen but Asus do have a handy tool that you can find where you would download the drivers for your specific motherboard. Its a windows based tool which we would normally avoid like the plague but this is incredibly simple to use and worked without and fuss for us and got the system firing on all cylinders with the XMP and overclocking fixed in just a couple of minutes.

Clock Speeds

Such is the newness of the i7-5775C that we had a choice of waiting an age for a mature BIOS to maximise the overclocking, or test it at stock and concentrate on the Iris 6200. Given that the iGPU side of the Broadwell CPUs is definitely the big selling point, we focussed mainly upon that. That isn't to say that the i7-5775C is lacking in horsepower though. Despite the enormous amount of silicon dedicated to graphical prowess, the i7 still has all the bells and whistles one would expect from a range-topping Intel CPU. 3.7GHz is hardly slow, particularly when the i7-5775C has hyperthreading.

Overclocking

We only managed to get a 4.2GHz overclock out of the Broadwell chip we were sent which by previous generations of i7's seems a touch low. We do need to remember this is the first CPU we have had our hands on from the 14nm manufacturing process so things still may be a little raw. Voltage didn't help when trying to push further than this so we stuck with a safe voltage. Normally we would run some overclocked CPU tests but as we have tweaked our usual testing procedure to focus on the iGPU we didn't feel the need to confuse matters by adding another set of tests to the graphs.

Power Draw

The Iris 6200 is outstandingly efficient, helped in no small part by the 14nm process. This has other benefits too as even with the CPU and Iris in full effect the i7-5775C only reached 60°C. The 4790K pull less power in the GPU tests mainly because of the lack of any real power, the big figure here is the massive drop in power usage on the CPU only tests, if this is what 14nm will deliver across the board things could be getting very interesting.

jeesh how much die area are Intel wasting on they're flaming integrated GPU's ? intel we mainly want CPU's from you - not GPU's? I don't care about integrated graphics in desktop processors ? your spending so much energy on something, no one asked for? whose ambition is this ? wheres the cheap 8/16 core processor there should be here - by now ? instead at 14nm were still at quad core, the same as my 65nm q6600 processor wayback when ? a 4x reduction in process should mean if we have the same wafer area attributed to each die, 64 cores by now ? in very rough theory? if you just scaled down the q6600 transistor count cpu layout to the 14nm scale on the same die area as a q6600? (square area rule?) your deliberate failure to focus on more cores or the CPU portion of the processor transistor count, is beginning to be aggravating in the extreme ? moores law has been broken for 8 years and you have not really delivered imo much CPU performance increase. Everyone but a minority seems unaware or happy with the status quo performance wise youv'e been delivering? that consumers have been roughly receiving the same quad core power with small performance bumps for a long time, you may not have allot of competition from AMD but you've been taking the mickey compared to your illustrious history of performance increase in the past. and yes more cores don't always translate to more performance in individual programs depending how they're written, compared to higher frequencies etc, but lets be honest running many programs at once is smoother with many more cores. if any CPU manufacturer delivered a non iGPU CPU and threw down the CPU performance hat once more it would be interesting to see what could really be offered at this process scale ?Quote

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